Today I was forced, yet again, to defend my love of the Bruckheimer experience, specifically Con Air. Lil, MCB's adorable Greek coworker, is particularly having none of this shit. His position, intellectually more defensible than mine, is that Con Air is an inconsequential film.
Now, if you flip through my DVD collection, you will find I have a tendency towards "the heavy shit." Dramas of the consequential variety make up a significant portion of my collection, and my Netflix queue is an excellent cure for a good mood. A lot of the movies I've particularly enjoyed over the last few years have been the kind of films that it would be reasonable to say are difficult to watch.
So why the Bruckheimer? Well, because I don't think movies have to be consequential. Some of them are; there's some real art out there, both the classics that we all know and discuss at parties to look cool, and small, unknown gems. The fact that movies can be high art, however, doesn't mean they have to be. There's plenty of entertainment out there to be had, goofy and grinning and self-consciously preening.
What I like about Con Air - indeed, what I like about most of Bruckheimer's better films - is that it never once apologizes. Con Air doesn't just take you out to the movies; it yawns, wraps an arm around you and cops a feel in the first 15 minutes. By the time the credits are rolling, it has you sweaty and dissheveled with your pants around your ankles. Con Air is not waiting for the second date. Con Air is going to nail you in the parking lot after the show.
If this seems like an excessively sexual metaphor, I want you to take a minute and consider the parellels between a Bruckheimer film and porn. Both follow an accepted formula to produce an emotional response. Both are significantly more interested in the visual and aural stimulation which will produce that response than in maintaining any kind of a coherent plot. Both, in the end, are interested in your enjoyment, not a message. The thing that is appealing, both in porn and Bruckheimer films, is the honest, unapologetic pursuit of getting you off. To me, this is entirely preferable to a film like The Other Boelyn Girl, which engages in a pretense of artful seriousness to disguise the fact that it's nothing but a sensationalist romance novel.
Con Air doesn't waste your time. It gives you a good-looking, upstanding man to root for, a lot of really bad guys to hate (but be fascinated by), an actual dickhead to really, really hate, and a geeky guy to identify with, then puts them through a series of predictable climaxes that make sure to let you know exactly how you're supposed to respond. The cinematography tells you, the music tells you, the witty action movie one-liners tell you. Con Air asks nothing of you, it only wants to entertain. It knows you want the money shot, and by god, it will give it to you.
Last night, I went to see Darron Aronofsky's The Wrestler. As all the critics are saying, it's a damn fine film and a hell of a performance by Mickey Rourke (not to mention Marisa Tomei). Enjoying the Bruckheimer experience doesn't detract from my enjoyment of this thoughtful, emotional film, nor does the reverse occur. Just because they were both committed to film and screened in a theatre doesn't mean they have to be measured by the same yardstick. You wouldn't compare a really great hamburger to a 6 course molecular gastronomy tasting menu, so why compare Bruckheimer to Aronofsky?
In a way, this serves as a good metaphor for this blog, and particularly the name I chose for it. It's too easy to get hung up on the idea that things are only good if you can measure them on an imaginary elitist scale of High Quality Art. We want to believe that things produced for the masses, by their very nature, cannot be good. It is enormously satisfying to wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of superiority and ignore the mainstream, but in doing so, we deny ourselves the right to identify with our fellow man. Is it possible to be an elitist and a populist at the same time? I don't know, but I intend to keep trying.
